Ubuntu and Kubuntu vs. Mepis

[Don Erickson]

On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, Justin Dugger wrote:

> Ive gone through two upgrades of Ubuntu thus far, with minimal
> troubles.  Yes, there was a root password leak that wasn't caught
> until lately.

Well, it's not actually the root password, because ubuntu doesn't let you 
set a root password.  It's the installer password, the installer user can 
sudo to do root things.  Maybe this is a minor point.

But, if you wish to set a root password, here's how:
$sudo vi /etc/shadow

Now remove the '*' from the top (root) line;

root:*:13234:99999:7:::
      ^ remove this

Save the file and IMMEDIATELY run

$ passwd root

This will let you set a root password.

I recently installed the AMD64 Ubuntu on an HP Turion 64 laptop.
But I also set apt/sources to get sid and merillat packages, it was a 
was a little squirrelly with its dependencies, and after compiling an 
ATI driver for the 200M Radeon, hey, it works pretty well.

Much easier than any raw Debian laptop install I've ever done, once I 
figured out the nolapic, noapic, and vga=771 initial command line install 
arguments.


Regards,

-Don